Abbas: "In a final resolution, we would not see the presence of a single Israeli - civilian or soldier - on our lands"

From Jihad Watch / Posted by Robert Spencer

When Pamela Geller devised the ad above and we tried to run it in Seattle (in response to bogus "Palestinian" ads claiming that "Palestinians" don't have equal rights in Israel), Seattle transit balked, saying that the statement wasn't true. We then provided proof from statements by Mahmoud Abbas and other "Palestinians," and the ads ran -- whereupon local news reports prominently featured a "Palestinian" activist saying that the claim was false. But now Abbas has said it again: a "Palestinian" state will be completely empty of Jews. Hitlerite dreams from the "moderate" "Palestinian" "leader":

"Abbas: 'Not a single Israeli' in future Palestinian state," from Reuters, July 30:

CAIRO - Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas laid out his vision on Monday for the final status of Israeli-Palestinian relations ahead of peace talks due to resume in Washington for the first time in nearly three years. 

Abbas said that no Israeli settlers or border forces could remain in a future Palestinian state and that Palestinians deem illegal all Jewish settlement building within the land occupied in the 1967 Six Days War.

The forceful statements appeared to challenge mediator US Secretary of State John Kerry's hopes that the terms of the talks, scheduled to begin Monday night over dinner, be kept secret.

"In a final resolution, we would not see the presence of a single Israeli - civilian or soldier - on our lands," Abbas said in a briefing to mostly Egyptian journalists.

"An international, multinational presence like in Sinai, Lebanon and Syria - we are with that," he said, referring to United Nations peacekeeping operations in those places....

Taliban Resurgence in Iraq, Libya, and Pakistan

Night Watch/ Townhall Finance Columnist

China-Japan: Feedback: A Brilliant and well informed Reader noted that the US Coast Guard was established by Congress as a fully military organization, although not under the Department of Defense. Under US law it is not a paramilitary organization, uses US naval ranks and its members are subject to the US Uniform Code of Military Justice.

On the other hand, it is a lightly armed military organization that is similar to lightly armed organizations in many other countries that describe themselves as paramilitary and have law enforcement authority over civilians. The Chinese describe their coast guard as a "paramilitary force."

The Chinese participate in coast guard forums with the US and the Asian states so their coast guard leaders are very well informed about practices and tactics in non-communist states.

Pakistan: During this Watch, Presidential elections will begin in Pakistan. Mamnoon Hussain, a textile businessman and a close ally of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, is expected to become the next president. The opposition Pakistan People's Party (PPP) members of parliament intend to boycott the election because the original date of the elections was moved forward in respect of Ramadan observances.

Comment: As noted in a prior edition, the president of Pakistan is elected by an electoral college comprised of the members of the national parliament and the members of the provincial parliaments.
Pakistan no longer has a presidential system of government. That ended after the ouster of Musharraf when Pakistan reverted to a modified Westminster-style parliament. The president only performs the ceremonial functions of the head of state. The head of government does all the rest.

The PPP boycott is symbolic. The party is discredited because of its poor record of government plus it has no candidate for the presidency who has a chance of election. The boycott avoids a humiliating trouncing.

Internal Security. About 150 Pakistani Taliban gunmen and bombers attacked the central jail in Dera Ismail Khan, in northwestern Pakistan, on Monday. The government claims only 40 Taliban escaped, from the 5,000 prisoner population at the jail. The Taliban claim they freed 300 Pakistani Taliban.

They killed five policemen and prompted the Pakistan Army to send reinforcements.

Comment: This is the fourth major prison break in an Islamic country in less than a week. The significance is that the militant groups in three countries risked a great deal in coordinated attacks to free veterans. All almost certainly had inside help.

That suggests the groups highly valued the skills and knowledge of the men in jail. It raises the prospect that insurgent groups in Iraq, Pakistan and Libya will manifest signs of improved attack planning and leadership in coming weeks. The timing suggests significant learning is occurring across continents among distant and disparate militant groups.

Iraq: Update. A wave of at least 12 car bombs killed at least 60 people and wounded 200 in mostly Shia areas of Baghdad and in other southern towns. The low level insurgency continues.

Egypt: In the Nile River Delta city of Mansoura and the Canal city of Ismailia, pro-Mursi marches resulted in clashes with police. The marches were protests of excessive use of force by security forces last Saturday. No casualties have been reported yet.

The most portentous new development is a statement by the interim prime minister that the government has no intention to declare a state of emergency.

Comment: The Muslim Brotherhood and its Islamist supporters once again are showing their fundamental strength: acting in opposition. Their strategy is to present themselves as the victims of government abuses so as to re-generate broad popular support. Acting as the victim in opposition is a much more familiar role than acting as a steward of good government.

On the other hand, the interim government appears prepared to oblige the pro-Mursi supporters by making them the victims, or targets, of a state of emergency.

In north Sinai, two policemen and one soldiers were killed on Sunday and Monday.

Tunisia: In a defiant speech on Monday, Prime Minister Larayedh rejected opposition demands that his government and the constitutional assembly step down and promised on Monday to complete the country's democratic transition with a new constitution by August and elections in December. This followed an emergency meeting of the Islamist-led government.

A powerful trade union also held a meeting to plot its next steps to "decide the fate of the country."

The secular opposition, emboldened by events in Egypt, is now rejecting all concessions and reconciliation efforts by the government. It has called for the 217-member Constituent Assembly to be dissolved. In the last few days, 70 lawmakers have left the body. Small symbolic demonstrations continued for a fourth day outside the hall of the Constituent Assembly.

In Tunis, security forces sealed Bardo square, located outside the building where the transitional Constituent Assembly meets, with barbed wire and fencing. In the southern city of Sidi Bouzid, angry protesters tried to storm municipal offices to stop employees from going to work, residents said, sparking clashes with Ennahda supporters. Ennahda is the leading party in the governing coalition.

Meanwhile, on the Algerian border, Islamic militants ambushed a Tunisian Army patrol, killing 8 soldiers, five of whom had been mutilated.

Comment: The most significant security measure was the closure of Bardo Square. This is significant because it disrupts civil normality and the exercise of the rights of assembly and speech to protect property and maintain civil order. That behavior is known as an incongruity and it always signifies a weak government that has no response to the protestors except curtailment of their rights. The government is feeling pressed.

Nigeria: Boko Haram killed 20 civilians fishing village on Lake Chad in northeastern Nigeria. The large army operations had limited impact. The Boko Haram terrorists evaded the Army and continued attacks as usual.

Big Brother NSA is Watching You, But Maybe Not For Long

Bob Barr/ Townhall Columnist

Last week, the Obama Administration dodged a bullet when its last-minute lobbying defeated an amendment that would have ended the NSA’s massive surveillance program of American citizens. The amendment, proposed by Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) to a defense-spending bill, would have stopped the collection of intelligence data pursuant to Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act unless the targets of the investigation actually were under investigation. Under this Administration's interpretation of the law, it vacuums up data on virtually every electronic communication of every person in the country, by using Section 215 far more broadly than the law provides, or was intended to allow.

The amendment barely failed -- falling short by just a mere 12 votes in a vote that exhibited rare bipartisan coalitions both supporting, and opposing, the amendment. Apparently, a push by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Cali.) in the final hours before the vote was the saving grace for the NSA surveillance program.

The surprisingly narrow vote, however, is a good sign that privacy advocates on the Hill -- reflecting broader concerns of the American people -- are finally giving this massive surveillance program the scrutiny it deserves.

What Amash understands, and what establishment cronies like Pelosi fail to understand, is that there is a changing tide of public opinion regarding America’s national security programs. The American public no longer is content to give Uncle Sam a blank check to do whatever he pleases, so long as it is done to “protect us from the bad guys.” Revelations by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden showed, for the first time in broad daylight, just how far the government has gone since 9-11 to collect all manner of private data on law-abiding civilians not under any criminal or national security investigation. The still-unfolding IRS scandal feeds into this concern.

Americans now appear ready to dial it back, in a big way.

Public opinion of Obama and Congress are at all-time lows, due in no small measure to the miserable job both the Executive and Legislative branches have done to protect the constitutional rights of citizens. In fact, a Gallup poll from June shows the majority of Americans oppose the federal government’s dragnet snooping programs that collect private information about citizens not under investigation. Even the New York Times, typically a shill for the Obama Administration, notes what it calls “rapidly shifting politics” that started on the fringes of both parties but has spread into mainstream politics.

There is, of course, pushback to stemming the government’s domestic surveillance operations.

However, this stonewalling is coming not from citizens, but from establishment politicians who believe the public doesn’t know what’s best for itself. For example, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, Obama’s pal and a likely 2016 presidential hopeful, last week called the “strain of libertarianism” going through both parties “dangerous” to America’s national security and blamed Senator Rand Paul as its primary cheerleader.

Christie is right that Paul is one of the Constitution’s biggest and most vocal supporters in Congress, and we’re lucky to have him. But Christie is wrong in suggesting that a “strain of libertarianism” is infecting both parties. The support of civil liberties and the expectation that the government follow the Rule of Law hardly is a new concept to Republicans or Democrats. Even though it is clear that both major parties periodically have forgotten their duty to uphold the Constitution, Republicans, at least, have traditionally been the watchdogs of Big Government. What Christie sees as a new trend is simply the resurgence of constitutionalism within the GOP, and among many independents; it is a return to conservative roots where government is not to be trusted blindly when it comes to the privacy rights of American citizens.

This shift against government snooping augurs poorly for political elitists like Christie, Pelosi, and Obama -- public officials who feel they serve the interests of the State over the interests of the People. The American public is tired of limitless government data collection and the systematic abuse of civil liberties in the name of “national security.” Let us hope this trend is not just a fad or temporary strain of privacy activism but a wholesale change in how the public views government.

While Amash’s NSA amendment is defeated for now, Republicans should capitalize on the growing public support for intelligence reform and rebrand themselves as the party committed to the Constitution. Republicans have a unique opportunity to reclaim the high ground, but only if they tune-out the “sky is falling” squawking of the Old Guard and begin to make earnest reforms; not only regarding the NSA and IRS, but every federal bureaucracy.

Republicans decidedly not impressed with Obama’s “grand bargain” head-fakery

by Erika Johnsen / Hot Air

With much ado about absolutely nothing, and accompanied by his usual and so very delightful attacks on Republicans for clearly being motivated by nothing in this world beyond the desire to thwart him personally, President Obama introduced a faux attempt at a “grand bargain” in yet another speech on Tuesday wherein he would supposedly cede corporate tax reform to Republicans in exchange for “investments” in infrastructure and education, a raise in the minimum wage, etcetera. (…I.e., the only ideas he seems to have in relation to economic growth.

One wonders how we ever managed to get along before the federal bureaucracy metastasized into its currently huge and malignant form.) The president also accused the GOP of “passing over long-term fiscal challenges” at the expense of the middle class — which is weird, seeing as how the president’s speech contained nary a mention of entitlement reform.

Odd.

Of course, the president really has no intention of lowering tax burdens or even revenue neutrality; rather, the small reductions in rates he’s offering would be more than offset by the lost deductions and preferences with which he wants to do away, resulting in a net increase in revenue with which he can pay for his precious “investments.” The Republican leadership was not impressed:

“This proposal allows President Obama to support President Obama’s position on taxes and President Obama’s position on spending, while leaving small businesses and American families behind,” said Michael Steel, spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner. …

Plus Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell suggested the move could suck the wind out of an effort by a bipartisan duo on Capitol Hill to push for broad-based tax reform this year.

McConnell, on the floor said the proposal “represents a serious blow to one of the best chances for true bipartisan action in Washington.” He called it a “rebuke” to Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., who along with House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp, R-Mich., is trying to build support nationally for a massive tax code overhaul.

Also, via Roll Call:

Lawmakers regarded President Barack Obama’s latest attempt to engage them on an economic proposal as largely irrelevant Tuesday, with neither Democrats nor Republicans viewing it as an actual step forward toward breaking their ongoing budget impasse. …

“I don’t think they’ve been acting in good faith. I really don’t, in the sense of really trying to bring both sides together,” Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, R-Utah, said Tuesday.

“I think they’re hoping that there will be some maverick Republicans who will ignore the basic Republican doctrines and do this with them with all the Democrats,” the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee continued. “It’s clear they want a very liberal approach toward everything, especially tax reform.” …

Anyhow, it’s really much more about creating a messaging platform from which to stand above the fray come the all-important 2014 midterms than any serious attempt at good-faith compromise, which is precisely what the president wants to be able to claim he’s doing. But as the WSJ explained, Obama’s “grand bargain” was meant to be a bargain for precisely nobody… except Obama:

This isn’t a serious proposal, and he knows it. It also isn’t bipartisan, since he is offering a compromise with appeal to the ideological spectrum running from Elizabeth Warren to Chuck Schumer. Perhaps these are the only Members of Congress whom Treasury Secretary Jack Lew has in his iPhone.

The real bipartisan reform opportunity would be to get behind the chief Senate and House tax writers, Democrat Max Baucus and Republican Dave Camp. They’ve been holding hearings on tax reform for years, and Mr. Baucus has even invited all Senators to send him a list of tax provisions they’d like to retain and why.

The problem, as ever, is that Mr. Obama simply can’t get over his ideological fixation to keep tax rates as high as possible. We say “ideological” because his own advisers concede that a 35% rate hurts U.S. business competitiveness.

Newsmax
Issa Accuses White House, IRS of Stonewalling on Targeting Probe

By Todd Beamon

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Rep. Darrell Issa accused the Obama administration and its new IRS chief on Tuesday of obstructing his panel's investigation into the agency's targeting of tea party, conservative and religious groups.

If "the IRS continues to hinder the committee's investigation in any manner, the committee will be forced to consider use of compulsory process," the California Republican, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, wrote in a letter to Internal Revenue Service Acting Commissioner Daniel Werfel.

The letter, which was reported by The Washington Times and CNN, was also signed by Rep. Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican who also sits on the committee.

The letter, however, did not elaborate on exactly what steps Issa's panel might take, though he noted that impeding congressional investigators could result in prison terms of up to five years.

"Obstructing a congressional investigation is a crime," Issa and Jordan stressed in the letter.

"Despite your promise to cooperate fully with congressional investigations, the actions of the IRS under your leadership have made clear to the committee that the agency has no intention of complying completely or promptly with the committee's oversight efforts," the letter said.

"The systematic manner in which the IRS has attempted to delay, frustrate, impede, and obstruct the committee's investigation raises serious concerns about your commitment to full and unfettered congressional oversight," the document said.

The Issa-Jordan letter came on the same day when another House panel, the Ways and Means Committee, released an analysis showing that conservative groups faced more probing questions than did liberal groups seeking the same tax-exempt status.

Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp told the Times that conservative groups were asked three times as many questions, and were less than half as likely to get approval from the IRS.

Like the oversight committee, Camp said his investigators were also waiting on the IRS to turn over more information.

"This is just the tip of the iceberg," he told the Times. "We have received less than three percent of the documents responsive to the investigation."

Meanwhile, an IRS spokeswoman, Michelle Eldridge, told both the Times and CNN that the agency was "aggressively responding to the numerous data requests we've received from Congress.

"We are doing everything we can to fully cooperate with the committees, and we strongly disagree with any suggestions to the contrary," Eldridge said.

The letter claimed, for instance, that the IRS has handed over only 12,000 of the more than 64 million pages of documents initially identified as potentially relevant to the investigation into the alleged unfair targeting of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status.

"This incredibly slow pace of production has been an unnecessary attempt to frustrate the committee's oversight efforts," Issa and Jordan said in the letter.

Eldridge contended, however, that "while the volume of raw data collected ... is quite high, it is a misleading figure to use in order to determine the volume of material the IRS will ultimately produce."

"The vast majority of it is completely unrelated to the congressional investigations," she said.

"Once the data is limited to the time period in question, and the issue in question, we expect the final tally of produced documents will be far lower — in the neighborhood of 460,000 documents or fewer."

Eldridge said that 70 of 1,500 or so attorneys in the IRS chief counsel's office were currently working full time to respond to congressional inquiries into the matter.

It is a "time- and labor-intensive review process," she said.

In addition, the Issa-Jordan letter also complained that documents produced by the IRS "contain excessive redactions that go well beyond those necessary to protect confidential taxpayer information."

The letter also asserted that a senior IRS official — Cindy Thomas — had been "affirmatively prevented" from providing congressional investigators with relevant documents in her possession.

Additionally, Issa blasted the agency for allegedly trying to "carefully orchestrate the public release" of information contained in a 30-day review of the matter back in June — before providing the information to the committee.

Capitol Hill Republicans have long insisted that after President Barack Obama was first elected, the IRS started unfairly targeting conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status.

Democrats, however, argue the IRS improperly scrutinized groups on both the left and right as part of a clumsy attempt to administer vague election-related tax laws.

Op-ed: 
A misguided quest for a state by a people who do NOT exist 
By: Diane Sori

“It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but southern Syria.”
- Ahmed Shuqeiri, former chairman of the PLO

And so the lunacy begins…again.

As the Israeli/Palestinian 'supposed' peace talks get under way in Washington (and we all know Netanyahu is going along with this farce just to placate Obama because of Iran) all sides, including sadly some misguided Israelis, are missing one key factor…there is NO such thing as a Palestinian people, period.

And if there’s NO Palestinian people then there’s NO need for a Palestinian homeland…that simple fact is why NO peace accords will ever be reached.

The idea of a ‘Palestinian people’ with a language, culture, and nationality all their own, is the creation of former PLO head Yasser Arafat. Simply, he made them up to further the PLO and NOTHING more. His creation was embellished upon by the surrounding Arab nations and the media after the very humiliating Arab defeat to Israel in the ’67 war.

And what today’s so-called Palestinians and their sympathizers try to call Palestine NEVER existed as an autonomous entity because there has NEVER been a country known as Palestine governed by Palestinians.

Today’s so-called ‘Palestinian people’ are just regular run of the mill Arabs who speak Arabic, whose ‘so-called’ religion is islam, and whose culture is shared by the surrounding Arab nations, and NO matter how much they protest, there are NO genetic differences between Jordanians, Syrians, Lebanese, and the so-called Palestinians. And anyway most Arab nationalities… Jordanians, Syrians, Lebanese, etc…were invented by the British Colonial Office in the nineteen-twenties as more recognizable boundaries were being drawn after WW1. Before then all who lived in those newly formed countries were just known as ‘Arabs’.

These facts make the so-called Palestinians and their wanting a Palestinian homeland just another political and tactical tool in the Arab…actually in the muslim…arsenal used in their ultimate goal of trying to destroy the Jewish nation of Israel…the Jewish people…and NOTHING more.

And while the so-called Palestinians love to bloviate that they’re the region’s original inhabitants…inhabitants who they claim were driven out by the Jews when Israel became the Jewish homeland in 1948, they are actually NOTHING but descendants of the muslim conquerors who over the centuries drove out or subjugated the region’s original inhabitants…the Jews. And remember, what they love to call Palestine was actually part of the Ottoman Empire until the early 20th century, and that before Israeli won and occupied certain disputed areas of land in wars cast upon them by their Arab neighbors, Gaza was owned by Egypt and the West Bank was owned by Jordan, and there were NO so-called Palestinians then…just as there are NONE now.

And reality is in that today’s world the Arabs control 99.9% of all the Middle East lands…just look at a map and you’ll see the tiny sliver of land that is Israel…a sliver that takes up maybe one-tenth of one percent of the entire landmass. Yet even that tiny sliver is too much for the Arabs for they want it all, and NO matter how many land concessions the Israelis make it will never be enough for them for their goal remains to wipe the Jewish nation of Israel off the map.

To wipe the intruding Jews…the Zionists…off the map NO matter that there was NEVER in history a Palestinian state…NEVER a Palestinian kingdom or Palestinian kings…NEVER a Palestinian capital…nor a Palestinian language, culture, or anything even remotely comprising a Palestinian heritage.

NOTHING remotely that can be used as justification for a Palestinian state.

To wipe Israel off the map even though history shows there was an Israeli kingdom going back to the days of the Old Testament…there were Israeli kings in the kingdom of Israel…there was a capital in the kingdom of Israel, a capital forever known as Jerusalem…there was an Israel 2000 years before the self-proclaimed prophet mohammad dreamt that he’s flying on a “magical horse” from Mecca to Jerusalem…there was and is an Israeli language (Hebrew), a thriving Israeli culture, and an Israeli heritage going back to the days of Abraham.

And Israel isn’t just the name of a state…it’s first and for all time a name of a nation (Am Yisrael). Israel is the name of the father of the nation (Jacob) and Israelis are his descendants. The real meaning of the word ‘Israeli’ is someone who belongs to the nation of Israel and NOT only “a citizen of a state called Israel”. The word ‘Israeli’ (Yisraeli…Yisraelim in plural) is mentioned in the Torah and it’s used in Hebrew even today.

NO…there is NO justification for a Palestinian state in the land known as Israel for there is NO Palestinians to lay claim to such an entity…there NEVER has been and there NEVER will be.

And I think the so-called Palestinians would be better served if they gave up this misguided quest and instead tried to live by these wise words said by former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, a very wise woman indeed:

“We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children…We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.”